So dear oh dear, we’re finally ready to talk about actually doing the job. This is the funny thing – actually doing the job is so much easier to talk about then everything that leads to it. This is where we work the magic. This is where we get things done.

Rougly speaking, we have the usual phases of development that everyone has. They can run concurrently in some situations, and in others it might need to be one by one.

The first goal we are working toward, if it hasn’t in the SOW stage, is that a detailed timeline and scope document are arrived at. This usually involves a Discovery, or Strategy phase. It’s very similar to everything we’ve described above in the new biz process, because a lot of this we often do in the new biz process. Makes sense. The only other thing we’d like to add to this whole story here is that when we do this as part of a project, three things happen at the end of this phase: the scope document is finalized, the timeline is finalized and, if necessary, the SOW and Costs are adjusted to recognize the final reality of the project. Documents that come out of this process include the timeline, the project brief, the creative brief and, perhaps, a revised SOW.

Next, we have a bunch of things that sort of run concurrently. The producer will manage through this, but what happens at this point is that the creative concepting, technical planning and information architecture processes all kick in. We begin looking at the job from these three points of view, with the creative lead, technical lead, and information architect’s roles really kicking in to high gear. The documents that come out of this process are look and feel presentations, technical documents such as application flows, data models, the technical handoff documents, and, finally, information architecture documents such as sitemaps and wireframes. Depending on your and your teams level of interest in these things, you may or may not need to or want to see the technical and IA documents. Clients who are deploying our deliverables on their own web servers tend to care a lot more about this stuff than clients who are letting us handle the hosting, etc.

We’ve discussed a lot of this, obviously, in our primer above on interactive production, so we won’t delve into it too much. We do, however, want to point out a potential pitfall here. This whole phase – this is where things are set in stone. Wireframes, especially, have enormous impact on the outcome of the project. We lay all this stuff out on paper, first, because it’s impossibly difficult to be changing these things as the project continues. The very difficulty of such changes is the whole point of the wireframe process. It’s not uncommon for a first time interactive producer to forget this and approve the wireframes without understanding exactly what’s happening, and, later in the process, make requests for changes that are more or less set in stone. Of course, we’ll try and accommodate those requests, even when they come late – but this could well lead to unnecessary time or cost increases, which is never a good thing.

We should talk about look and feel approvals a little bit more, here, too. If you think about it, this is the single biggest challenge in a partnership between us and you. I mean, it’s crazy to even think, really, on the face of it that two companies can meet, be friends, and then perfectly collaborate. It’s crazy to think that all of the sudden we can perfectly understand the subtle nuances of a brand you may have lived with for a decade. And it’s even crazier to think this can all be done in two rounds of comps, with a deadline of a week or two. Seriously, it’s pretty amazing it ever happens, isn’t it? So, yeah, we know, we KNOW. We won’t always get it right. We know it can be a very stressful process the first time. We know that the terms and conditions of the SOW make the whole thing sound super rigid. It’s not gonna be that rigid, honestly. We all care, on both sides, of making it the best it can be. Our hearts are all in the right place. We’re not gonna derail a project because we’re hitting round 3 of look and feel approvals.

When things are going great, this phase glides by. It’s so awesome, and we all love it. So, like everything else, sadly, we should say a few words about when it gets difficult. Sometimes there will be ideas on the table that you don’t like, or we don’t like. We should always strive to be frank about these disagreements, and open. It’s not personal. There are times where you’re gonna ask us what we think of something and we’re gonna say “that is the most brilliant idea ever! Give that person a Lion!” There are also times that we’re gonna say “eh, we’re not so into that,” and, worse, there are times we’re gonna say “oh man, don’t do that, that would be bad bad bad.” And there are times you’re gonna respond to that and say “do it anyway.” And sometimes we’ll say “okay, but it’s a bad idea.” And sometimes, we will, actually, say “no.”

And this, my friends, is the rub. It seems completely antithetical to a company that claims to be in the business of serving you, doesn’t it? It seems snobby. It seems close minded. And actually, it’s really pretty rare we say “no,” outright. When we do, it’s because we feel like something larger is at play – our reputation, your reputation, the law, ethics. That sort of thing.

And it may seem kind of ridiculous that we’ll even tell you we think something is a bad idea. It also seems kind of antithetical to a company that claims to be in your service. Our take on it is that we serve your interests even when they’re not clear. We serve a client’s interest, even when individuals within that company may have a different take on it. The important thing to remember is this: even when disagreements arise, we are 100% basing our decisions on what we think is best for your project. We’re not out to get you, honest.

It feels a bit dumb even saying this, and maybe I’ll delete this paragraph later, but we really do know what we’re doing. Sometimes it seems ridiculous. Sometimes it seems pig headed. Sometimes it seems too obsessed with, say, awards, than with effectiveness. Sometimes it seems like we don’t care. We care. We care so much. This is our lives, man. Haha. We know what we’re doing, and we are committed to making your project the best it can be. Trust is. It’s gonna be awesome.

So now we come to the whole concept of actually producing the work. This is so shockingly more straightforward than you would think. I mean, there’s all this magic happening there, and brilliant people are doing brilliant things. You should see some of the code that comes out of this whole process. It’s amazing. You should see those art directors and flash programmers at work. It’s phenomenal. Everything is so awesome.

The only real potential pitfalls here are the usual project management headaches like changes in scope, or all of the sudden your clients wants the whole thing a week earlier. Both of these are handled with the issuing of what we call an in-pro. An in-pro (short for, amazingly, “in production”) is an addendum to the SOW that modifies the scope of a project and corrects the costs accordingly. Costs incurred on in-pros will be added to the second, and final, invoice on the project. We, of course, get you to sign off on them. Let’s talk about some of these issues in detail.

There is one other pitfall to look for here – actually, the most common. This is the delay in approvals. We should think about this. We have you as a client. You have like three people internally that need to approve something. Then we have the end client, and however many people that need to see something over there. This can take a really, really long time. That, in itself, is fine. But we need to balance it all out. How much time do we have to complete the project? How much time do we need to actually produce the project? It’s important to be mindful of the time we actually have. More than once (much, much more than once) we have seen agencies literally take the entire duration of a project that was originally scheduled, and have it ALL be approval time. If you need to have 10 people at two companies approve every step of the way, months of approvals will happen.
Now, you’re paying us to complete a task. Within an agency, there aren’t any contracts between, say, the copywriter and the ECD, so it’s common for things to slip a bit. But you gotta help us out here. We just signed a paper and put our reputation on the line that we could complete something for you in a specific amount of time, and, though it’s getting a short shrift in this large document, the time to produce the job is very important, and we need it to actually produce. We do, of course – of COURSE – work with you as much as possible when we’re planning the job to include plenty of time for approvals, and generally, this works really well when jobs aren’t rushed. What we see often though is that all-too-familiar set of circumstances. We have no doubt this sounds familiar to you: the job needs to be rushed. There’s an event coming up. We need 12 weeks but we only get 8. You bid it out to like 5 companies. 3 of them say no, they can’t do it. We say we can, but we need to do it in exactly this way, and approval cycles need to be no more than 2 days each, and there can only be 4. This all sounds good, and you have a chat with your team and everyone gets it, and besides, no one’s really got any options. The client is mandating that it get done by this date. Everything’s a go, we all start rocking. And then all of the sudden, at the look and feel presentation, it transpires that the client needs to approve everything, and they have gone on vacation for a week.

This happens all the time. We work with you to handle these unforeseen hiccups in approvals and schedules as best as we can, but sometimes we need to be mindful that they may affect costs or timing.

And let’s talk about lawyers. Lawyers. Man, it’s like they solved all of this. It feels like they must live pretty good lives. Lawyers have no problem saying “you’ll get it in a week” even if you have $10 million of media running in 4 days. We must admit we haven’t ever met the lawyers at the end of the innumerable legal approvals that we’ve had to get for the hundreds of jobs we’ve produced, so they’re a bit of a mythic creature to us. What we do know, though, is that lawyers can be one of the common ways a projects timeline gets derailed. There’s not a whole lot we can do to help you here – most of the time we can’t even talk to your lawyers. All we can say is be aware of the potential pitfall up front, and maybe try and give them a heads up that you’re in a rush, if you are. We can, of course, build in enough time for legal approvals in the original timeline, so it helps if you know approximately how long they usually take.

Oh man, here it is. The biggest problem of any project. Change. Life is time and time is money and time and money are chaos. ** happens. If something can go wrong, it will. We hope, we pray, that the grace and skill with which we handle unexpected changes proves to you, as our client, that we are the right people for the job.

With an agency, timing changes are almost institutionalized. Often these things don’t seem like a big deal. We’re a small company, though, and we don’t have a lot of extra resources lying around. If your project is scheduled to be finished on day x, that means that the team was gonna take a short break, and then immediately start on new projects. Of course we pad these dates – if something can go wrong, it will. It would be folly not to build in a little protection. But this is the fundamental problem. If a project gets delayed, while it’s nice in some cases to have the extra time to make it better, in many cases this means it’s actually going to cost more. Our price to you was almost certainly based on how much it cost to have the certain people working on it work on it for Z number of weeks. If Z increases, the costs need to increase.

Additionally, if unexpected delays are incurred, while it is often possible to rush to catch up, it’s often not. It doesn’t always work that way. We do our best to accommodate you – especially when your client is being difficult on approvals and its as much out of your hands as ours. But there are times when waiting a week for the client to okay something is gonna blow our timeline and, thusly, our costs. We can negotiate these with in-pros, and we will always warn you in advance if you are in jeopardy of incurring extra fees or blowing your timeline.

Another thing that separates us from a huge interactive agency or traditional agency is that throwing extra resources is not always an option. We don’t have 400 people sitting in a back room waiting for us to throw them some work. It would be awesome if we did, but what we do requires very skilled individuals, and they’re hard to find. When things are good we can usually get 1 or 2 on to help out, but not always.

All in all, though, with excellent communication, and an understanding of how things work, your producer and ours can keep things in line without too much trouble. And remember the golden rule of project management: you can have it fast, cheap or well made. Pick two.

So let’s talk about the red-headed stepchild of interactive production: QA. Poor QA. It is so maligned. We’re making advertising here, after all, not some banking site. We only have 8 weeks, can’t we take that last week and make another game or something? Do we really want to take a whole week just to make sure everything’s fixed? I mean, isn’t The Barbarian Group awesome? Don’t they do it right the first time? Man, I tell ya. We, of all people, have been down this road so many times. QA, to this day, still gets cut from projects far, far too often.

Love the lowly QA, and let’s all try to keep it in the process. We know you’re thinking about cutting it, but we’re gonna say our schpiel anyway. QA is ridiculously important. It is horribly embarrassing for a brand to launch a site that breaks. It’s even worse then there is, say, a sweepstakes involved, and the bugs can have legal ramifications. Removal of the QA process might affect how valid our warranty guarantees are in the T&Cs of of the SOW. In any case, it’s really, more than anything, insurance – insurance that the site is done right. Insurance that nothing will break. Insurance that we all won’t look dumb.

10… 9… 8…7…6…5…4…3…2…1! Ladies and gentlemen, we have lift off. The Launch. It’s so exciting! Yay! The site is live! And if we did a QA, the site even works exactly like we wanted! WOOO!!! Oh man, congrats. Let’s break out the Veuve. This is interactive, after all, we don’t get Kristal. For a while there in 2001, we were down to Korbel. Anyway, yes, congratulations. This launched. It’s awesome

The one thing we want to say about launches, though this trend has died down a bit: beware the highly-expected, must launch exactly on-time launch. This was super common in the late 90’s and early oughts. People would put count down timers on their site, and have some huge party planned for the launch of a site, and, boom, a battery would die, or the power would go out in Fresno, where the servers were located, or someone got sick. If you have to do this kind of launch, have the site done at least 2 weeks in advance. Have it just sitting there, done, QA’d and ready to roll. And have four different people know how to make it go live. That’s our two cents on that one.

Post-launch, of course, other things happen. Exponentially more people see the site than did during our production process. And they all have comments and ideas. A lot of them are bad (ha), but there are always some good ones. There are things that people will suggest and we’ll all smack our head and think “oh man! Yes! We should have done that.” The CEO’s wife will suggest something should be turquoise, and boom, we gotta make a change. We talked a lot, up above (in “Our Philosophy on Maintenance Contracts”) about how we’d prefer to approach this, but the short version is we’re here for you. If you need something after the launch, let us know.

We’ll also, of course, bill you at this point for any outstanding balance – usually the second 50% and the amount of any signed in-pros during the project. Money is a good thing.